by William King
What is it doing here? It seems there are no Space Marines aboard this ship, after all. It has been guarded like a treasure and presumably it is worth something to the humans. More to the point, it may be worth something to me. I lift it and take it, passing it to one of my guard. As I do so I hear a warning come in over our comm-channels. It is from Jalmek, the pilot of my boarding craft.
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Is there a hint of gloating in Jalmek’s voice? I feel a sudden lurch in my stomach. The humans are mad enough to travel through the realm of the soul devourers. If I am still aboard the vessel when it makes the jump, all that I am will be lost to the ancient enemy of our kind.
For a moment, I picture Jalmek giving the order to pull away, leaving the attack force stranded in this most terrible of all predicaments. If that is the case, there is only one way to forestall such a fate: cripple the human ship’s engines before it can make the jump or take over its bridge and force the conclusion of the jump attempt that way.
I ask for reports from my sub-commanders. They are making progress towards their objectives but very slowly; too slowly. I consider ordering them all to concentrate on driving towards a single objective.
It might work – but then again the human commander has shown himself perfectly capable of understanding and responding to our attacks. He will merely regroup and concentrate his forces to prevent us from achieving our objective. He could slow us long enough to ensure we are trapped aboard the vessel while he makes the insane leap into the forbidden. Pure terror at that prospect begins to flare in my mind, the unreasoning fear that all eldar have of confronting She Who Thirsts.
We don’t have time. We don’t have time. The panic beats on my brain in waves. I am filled with the nauseating fear that we will be trapped aboard this primitive vessel as it makes its leap into the realm of madness; that our beacon-bright souls will attract the attention of the devourers.
The prospect of abandoning some of my bodyguard on the ship to achieve exactly this saunters into my mind. I imagine the fear of the stranded eldar and the fate of the humans as their vessel is warp-lost. It is a prospect not without appeal but I would not be there to enjoy it, and nothing would be more likely to spark a mutiny among my troops than the suspicion I had done this.
I bark out orders to begin the withdrawal. We will return to our ship and destroy this vessel at our leisure.
I sense disappointment among the stupider of my followers who wish to continue to fight and feast. The wiser heads understand the reason for my decision. I sketch an ironic farewell to the human commander in the air. Enjoy your petty victory while you can. It will be short-lived.
I take the gauntlet with me. It will be an interesting souvenir of this encounter.
I saw the body of one man, partially flayed, skin stripped away from his flesh to reveal muscle and vein. He was still alive, paralysed by poison but in terrible agony as the venom slowly destroyed his nervous system in the most painful way. In the heat of combat, amid the fury of battle, what sort of sentient being takes time out to torture a victim, to peel them like an epicure consuming a drugged black grape?
There were too many examples of that sort of thing for me to imagine that the first was simply an accident. The eldar killed in an unclean fashion, caused pain for the pure pleasure of it, showed no more regard for life than a small boy tormenting a garbage scuttler. There were times when it seemed they would rather torture than fight. No – it did not seem that way, it was that way. For the eldar, pain was like a drug to which they were addicted. They craved it the way a dried-out boozehound craves his next drink.
In the midst of chopping their way through a company of men, they would suddenly pause, stand stock-still save for their helmeted heads, which would swivel from side to side, surveying everything as serenely as a man inspecting a garden.
At such moments, if you glanced around, it appeared that there might even be a pattern in the way the corpses had fallen, some strange symmetry in the lie of the severed limbs on the floor and blood spatters on the walls. It sounds bizarre, but that’s the way it seemed to me; that if I looked long enough I might discern some sort of structure underlying the flow of carnage. I strongly suspected that I would no longer be sane as humans measure sanity if I did.
I race through the corridors, listening to the chatter of small pockets of our troops who have been cut off. They are surprised to find the tables turned on them. They are having difficulty in understanding that they are no longer the hunters but the hunted. They pay for their lack of swift understanding with their lives.
I bound along the corridor, using ceiling and walls as easily as floor, scouting ahead of my own troops, keen to get off the ship and begin cleansing the universe of these human vermin.
Even as I do so, I sense the presence of humans ahead of me, moving to close the gap. I smile. The human commander misses nothing. He must be supervising the battle as closely as I. He realises that things have turned, although I wonder if he realises why.
Up ahead I suddenly see a massive wall of armed men. It looks like I underestimated my foe. The force we had been fighting had been merely there to slow us down, while he assembled a small army to cut us off. The humans are flooding into the area where our ship had penetrated theirs. We are going to have to battle our way through. I speed forwards into the fray.
I aim a shot at the approaching humans, killing one. I dive into their midst, cartwheeling, kicking, slashing and shooting. The human leader may have planned for victory but he could not have planned for me. I unleash the full fury of my attack, in a way I so seldom do. A smile twists my lips as I bound among my targets, slaying every one with a stroke. Now is no time for artistry. We are mere minutes away from this ship making its jump. If we are to get away we must do so soon.
The remnants of my bodyguard smash into the human lines behind me. I have left very little for them to do. They merely have to kill the few humans that somehow squirmed beyond my reach. They do this with pleasure. Some of them are laughing. I wonder whether it is mirth or simply relief that they think we will be able to escape this craft before it makes the leap into the forbidden realms.
We fit ourselves into place as the boarding craft pulls away. Through the portholes I can see bodies being blown out into space as the air rushes into the vacuum, flesh already chilling. Some of the humans are still alive although not for much longer. I glance around and notice that we have some human faces among us. It seems some of my warriors have taken captives after all.
I am not as displeased as I ought to be. I am curious about the human who led this army. I have a few questions for them before they die.
And then suddenly it reached a climax. We advanced on the enemy. A horde of howling Guardsmen emerged from the side corridors, killing as they came. The eldar were suddenly caught between the hammer and the anvil.
Macharius had deployed our troops in such a way as to cut most of the eldar off from the hull breach they had been retreating towards. The corridors were packed with armed men, bristling with a density of weapons that was too much even for the xenos. Fast as they were they could not dodge every las-beam, there were simply too many of them; as well to try to dodge drops of rain in a typhoon. I think that then, at last, the eldar realised what had happened. I am not sure that even then they believed it. They seemed baffled.
Not that it mattered.
When they saw they could not escape they turned on us with a redoubled fury. Something had driven them to a frenzy of suicidal ferocity. The surviving eldar punched backwards towards us with the fury of daemons who know they are going to be destroyed and are determined to take as many victims to hell with them as they can. They came at us in great leaping bounds, weapons blasting, killing or crippling a man with every shot. Even then, at the last extremity, some of them could not re
sist causing pain rather than killing.
They charged across a junction, got caught in crossfire from both sides as well as from behind and from our position. It was a density of fire that Macharius had arranged. There was no way they could move through that blizzard of las-bolts without being hit. Their armour blistered and peeled and ran. They kept moving anyway, slowed perhaps by pain, but still determined to rampage and kill.
One reached us, slashing out with its long circular blades. It was shot in a dozen places, its beautiful, chitinous armour cracked and blistered. Its movements were slower than they had been but still almost too swift to follow. Macharius killed it with a blow and met its companion chainsword to blade. The teeth of his weapon screeched on the eldar’s carapace and one of those long inhuman limbs flew in a different direction from the body it had been attached to. The fallen eldar still stabbed a Guardsman, the reflexive killing stroke of a dying sand-scorpion. The man went down. I stepped away. It kept trying to roll closer, all grace gone, just a furious daemonic engine of death.
Anton blasted it with his sniper rifle, sending a heavy calibre slug right through the visor of the helmet. Even then it did not stop flailing its limbs until heartbeats later. Even in death it tried to claim another victim.
More eldar slammed into us, close combat weapons slashing at our men. Again blood spurted, bone was revealed, part of a lung flopped out from a ribcage that had been somehow sheared in two. I aimed the shotgun and pulled the trigger but my target simply was not there. In the time it had taken me to aim and pull the trigger it had sprung out of my line of fire and my shell passed beneath. A moment later it was poised in front of me. All I saw of its strike was a blur. I knew in that moment my death was on me.
I flinched, but the blow never connected. Macharius’s blade intercepted it. The eldar sprang back too fast for me to react but not too fast for the general. He followed it with a spring just as swift, and the xenos desperately tried to defend itself from a predator even more lethal than itself.
A second eldar was cleaving its way through our ranks when suddenly a bolt of strange lightning struck it, melting its helmet. A second later, Macharius had stepped forwards, chainsword in hand. There was a raucous screeching as the xenos’s armour gave way under the force of the impact. I noticed that Drake was standing behind Macharius then; it had been his psionic bolt that had taken the eldar down.
I took a quick glance around, looking for the last surviving eldar. It had realised what was going on now and was fleeing as fast as it could, moving swiftly through a glittering net of las-bolts, somehow managing to avoid the bulk of them while its armour shimmered and ran from the effects of the few that connected. Anton raised his sniper-rifle and sighted. His shot smashed into the eldar and it tumbled, still graceful, but hurt now. When it rose to its feet, some of its eerie grace had been leached away. Anton fired again and this time his shot hammered into its head. It fell flat. Some of us ran towards it.
‘Wait,’ said Macharius, his words coming out somewhere between a snarl and a shout. The men who had been moving forwards, led by Ivan, stopped and the Lord High Commander advanced. Once he was within reach the eldar struck, still almost too swift for the eye to follow. Macharius stepped to one side and decapitated it. I realised that the xenos, heavily wounded as it was, had been playing dead, hoping for some of us to come within reach so that it could take more victims with it. It would most likely have succeeded if Macharius had not been there.
I think they were overconfident those eldar, or we would have taken more casualties than we did. It seemed that not one of the Guardsmen wounded, no matter how lightly they were scratched, had survived. Macharius inspected the sword. A look of contempt flickered across his face.
‘Neurotoxins on the weapons,’ Macharius said. ‘Kill you painfully. Very painfully.’
I looked around and suddenly it was silent, one of those eerie moments you sometimes get on all battlefields, when just for an instant, by some strange coincidence, there are no weapons being fired, no screams echoing, no battle-cries pounding in your ears. The silence itself hisses and you are aware of your heart pounding and the taste of bile in your mouth, and you look around at your companions and you realise that they are all as pale-faced and wide-eyed as you, with that strange unblinking stare that the survivors always get when the thunder of battle has passed overhead and is gone.
It lasted only a few seconds and then everyone started to cheer, a release of tension that went on until we started to count the cost.
Seven
Reports kept coming in. I could tell just from what Macharius was saying that we had taken heavy casualties, but it looked as though the ship were clear of eldar. Their attack had failed. It had cost thousands of lives from among our own troops, and the Emperor alone knew how many tens of thousands from among the crew of the ship, but the eldar were gone, driven off.
Warning klaxons blared.
‘What now?’ Anton asked, still so high on the fury of battle that he forgot how close Macharius was.
‘We are about to make the jump,’ Macharius said. ‘The ship is being made ready.’
‘Sir, there are huge bloody holes in the hull where the eldar came through.’
‘The emergency bulkheads have been sealed and the screens are being ramped up to the maximum. It’s all we can do. It’s either make the jump or let the xenos blast us out of space.’ He smiled grimly. ‘I don’t think they will be inclined to spare us after the bloody nose we have just given them.’
It was too late to abort the warp jump even if he had given the order. The ship was already starting to shudder and vibrate, and I had the strange falling sensation I always got when we passed through into the warp.
I give the order to attack. Our ships swarm on the human craft, but it resists the fury of our assault. I order our ships to aim for any vulnerable point they can find, hoping to take out its drives. The human vessel smashes through the storm of fire and keeps accelerating. Its shields shimmer as it prepares to make its insane leap into the beyond. It occurs to me that we would, perhaps, be doing them a favour by destroying them, that instant death might prove to be a mercy compared to what may happen to them next.
I dismiss the thought. They may well survive – who knows what the probabilities are? No eldar has ever made a survey of them, but enough human ships move between the worlds to suggest that the odds are in favour of their madness, at least in the short term.
I wonder if there are any of my warriors still alive on board. My sensors say no, but there is always the possibility of error. I try to imagine what it would be like to be still aboard that ship as it crashed towards the forbidden. I wonder, do the humans really know what they are doing, entering a realm where the most evil beings in creation or below it lurk?
We begin another attack run. It may just be possible to cripple or destroy them before they make the jump. There is a certain pleasure to be gained from that.
We race closer again. The human weapons blast out at us but we are too swift for them, although evasive action slows our approach.
‘We will make it, Lord Ashterioth,’ Jalmek says.
‘Would you care to wager on that?’ I say. I am no longer convinced. Whoever is on board that ship has luck on his side, at least for today. Luck is always a fickle mistress, careless of whom she bestows her favours upon and when she withdraws them. Something tells me that today she smiles on my foe.
Jalmek looks at me. He has long ago learned the unwisdom of wagering against me. ‘I think not, sire.’
Nonetheless, he continues to give a stream of orders and course corrections designed to put us into attack position and, just for a moment, at the end of a long twisting and snaking run, I think he has done it.
‘Torpedo away,’ he says, and our vessel spits out the missile and sends it streaking towards our intended target.
At the moment of impact there is a blinding flash, so dazzling that the viewer turns shadowy as it filters the coruscating energies we a
re witnessing.
When I look again, the human ship is gone.
‘We destroyed it, sire,’ said Jalmek. I can tell he is wishing he had made that bet now. I study the space where the human ship was and I am not sure if he is right.
Once again the lights flickered. Once again there was a hideous sense of dizziness and nausea, as if I had suddenly fallen from a cliff into an infinite void. Near me some of the soldiers were being noisily sick. Men who had marched through the worst horrors the eldar had inflicted on us could not keep their food down now.
Everyone around me swayed; in the strobing warning lights their faces went from greenish and pale to red and bloody-looking and then back again. I leaned against a wall, supporting myself, trying to get a sense of what was happening. Fear filled my mind. We were making a jump with a ship that had been patched together after one failed flight and whose hull had been breached by the eldar. At any moment, I expected it to buckle, for all the daemons of the star-sailors’ ghost stories to start making themselves manifest. I stared at my companions as if any second they might be transformed into creatures of nightmare. Their features were oddly distorted.
Macharius stood there, glancing around him. ‘Take two minutes,’ he said. ‘Your bodies will adjust.’
After the battle was over Macharius went to inspect the wounded, for his presence among them was always a comfort. He found what I had been expecting, and I am sure what he had too, that there were far fewer of them than there ought to have been, and this was not good news.
A battle is a bloody affair but normally far more men take wounds than are killed outright. Often those wounds will kill far more of them than combat in the long run, but that is neither here nor there.